Cinema: Avatar

"The world shown in Avatar is fleshed out in such detail and scope that you really feel like you're in a place that exists" - Dan Lemmon (FX supervisor, Weta Digital

After seeing the film twice in 3D I couldn't agree more. The environments in the film have such depth it does seem like you could step into any scene, whether it be the lush forests of Pandora or the futuristic human base camp.

However, as astonishing as the world of Pandora looks, the inhabitants blow that all away. The main race of humanoids that make up the film are called the Na'vi, and are the most complex characters ever created. They have multiple skin tissue layers, as well as tendon sheets to create realistic dynamic flesh, however the faces of the characters are even more complicated. Weta used HD cameras to capture their actors facial expressions, then using their in-house software created a map of muscle firings for expressions and converted it into motion data that could be applied to the Na'vi. They would then compare Na'vi expressions to the actor expressions and tweak whatever they needed to. Also worth mentioning, to create wrinkles in the skin of the Na'vi, instead of using traditional methods of adding them in a displacement map (allowing them to simply dissolve in and out) they were actually sculpted into the models, allowing for skin to squash together to form the wrinkle. The characters are full of little techniques such as this.

At A Glance:

• Large trees in the forests had up to 1.2 million polygons each.
• 1,852 total shots1,818 animated shots
• 900 crew at peak 
• Crew from 46 different countries, spread across 6 locations
• The larger shots of Pandora had more than 1,000 digital assets, excluding characters
• More than 1,900 digital assets were created
• Some of the larger shots had use between 5-50 billion polygons
• Around 10TB of data generated per day
• 483 unique plants, with geometry and texture modifications there are over 3,000 variations
• 53 unique Na'vi characters with over 100 variations
• 25 unique vehicles
• 21 unique creatures created, with texture modifications there are 68 variations
• 90 unique environments - 1,500 shot specific terrain pieces/elements to make these up
• 4,352 rendering machines 
• 34,816 CPU cores
• 104TB of RAM